Dubai series: Hijack Advertising

The photo below is on the car of the guy I am staying with in Dubai. Have a look at the wheel cover on his 4 wheel drive, of which there are more than sedans on the road in said location.

You’ll notice that it has a cover on it for ‘Danube’ which happens to be a building materials company. Funny this is ‘Michael – the car owner’ doesn’t work there. He told me one day he returned to his vehicle to find it placed on his spare wheel.  I asked him if it annoyed him, and he proceeded to tell me, it doesn’t worry him as it protects his wheel, and it is a bit of a hassle to remove. Yep, he hasn’t got around to removing it yet…

Subsequently I noticed these on many cars in Dubai. Seems the other owners of the hijacked cars haven’t bothered to remove theirs either.

It’s an interesting piece of advertising and media invention. It is giving an item of value to the hijacked, that is the wheel cover, but on the same token it’s very interruptive. If the cover get’s thrown away, it becomes a costly exercise for the advertiser. I’m not sure it would be tolerated in a western market, but it’s innovative non the less.

Dubai Series: Business trip tips

We all know it’s very important to have a keep a diary during business travels. We’ve got to keep the tax man happy.

So here’s what I realized on my current overseas trip. I can keep all the records I need during my normal daily business procedures without keeping a separate diary.

The logos above, I love. Simply because they create time stamped digital footprints of the work I have done on my overseas trip.

Skype: Who I had chats with from the rentoid team, for how long, when and what was discussed.
WordPress: My ‘Global Marketing’ (subject I teach) research diary for Melbourne University, with insights found and relevant articles written.
Twitter: Staying in touch with rentoid members, chatting and sharing twitpics of ideas with strong marketing implications.

Of course most of the above are done on my iphone with also has the digital time stamps the Tax office requires.

It’s never been a more awesome time to travel on business. It’s easy to share ideas, and with these tools our diary doesn’t have to be a a labourious tax afterwards, but can be an interactive digital tool which is part of the fun during the trip.

Dubai Series: Hotel Sampling

Once you pass through the customs area in the Dubai International Airport they have a very interesting area reserved for Hotels as can be seen below.

The area has all of the 5 star hotels from the city represented. The general idea is that each hotel has a mini foyer with the exact styling and ambiance of the actual hotel. The mini foyer has Video footage of the hotel, details on menus and hotel services, samples of the haute couture fragrances in room and some even have masseurs for weary travelers to encourage / reward bookings. Concierge salespeople are there to explain the benefits and convert the sale. For those already booked they have a comfortable waiting location where they serve refreshments until the hotel driver arrives.

A simple idea, but one which makes sense for such a burgeoning metropolis and shows that even the oldest industries can innovate too.

New York Series (& Dubai…)

Startup blog author is lucky enough to be heading to New York and Dubai in a little over 2 hours.

So the coming entries on this little blog will be global marketing and ‘startup insights’ from abroad. If you have any particular areas of interest, or ideas you’d like to see covered, let me know in the comments.

Idea Borrowing

Some of the entrepreneurs of our time haven’t been the inventors we believe them to be. It’s not a criticism, entrepreneurship goes far beyond inventing and ideas. In fact some of our most revered entrepreneurs are simply good at cross fertilization.

Let’s take Steve Jobs for example. He didn’t invent the GUI (Graphical User Interface), the mouse, icons, paint, folders or any of the ‘user friendly’ things that Apple became famous for.

He ‘borrowed ideas’. By looking at related categories Jobs was able to adopt new thinking and bring it to his market in a way that made sense. He was a great normative thinker. The best example of Jobs in action was when he was invited into the Xerox PARC office for a study tour to ‘share knowledge’. In essence, they gave Jobs the key to their kingdom. This is where Jobs vision of the future of the personal computer grew from.

The first GUI was on a Xerox office workstation called the Alto. Closely followed by the Xerox Star in 1977 – see picture below.

Look Familiar?

The trip to Xerox by Apple computer’s Steve Jobs in 1979 led to the graphical user interface and mouse being integrated into the Apple’s Lisa and, later, the first Macintosh.

Jobs borrowed ideas, ideas born in a photocopier company.

Ebay took the excitement and quick sale of the auction process from real estate.

Craigslist made an electronic web based newspaper classified.

So the question begs to all entrepreneurs, what new technologies, ideas or systems can we borrow from adjacent industries?

Shifting advantage & contrarian actions

Once upon a time savvy surfers would get down to the beach early. It was the way to get smooth, uncrowded waves. To step into the ocean at dawn and share the tranquil waters with a few other dedicated salty skin brethren.

This was such an advantage that more and more surfers adopted this method of soul (and sole) surfing. Until the point arrived when there were more people in the line up before there was any daylight. You could often arrive at your favourite surf break only to find the largest crowd of the day was between 5am and 8am. It got ridiculous, the crowd had caught on.  There is now zero advantage in getting up early to go surfing.

I got so annoyed with the crowds, that I decided to sleep in on surfing days regardless. Why get to the beach early and be greeted with the largest surfing population the day has to offer? It wasn’t worth the effort. So I started heading down the coast at either 10am or 2pm. I still avoided midday, but shifted my surfing times to mid morning and afternoon.

Next thing I found was that my ‘contrarian’ actions had resulted in a boon. Uncrowded waves and a sleep in! Turns out most people rarely surf for more than a couple of hours. So even the early morning laggards start to exit the water mid morning.  My current example, was two days ago: I went surfing in a very popular location near Torquay, in 37 degree c warm weather, had perfect waves and only one other person in the water at 2pm. No surfer would believe this is happening.

The point for entrepreneurs is; Like the waves, positioning advantage is constantly shifting. What is an advantage this year, will certainly change next year. But we will never know this if we always accept conventional wisdom of ‘where to be and when’.

Reverse

A great meme in business is the law of the opposite. ‘Every market, has an equal and opposite market. When I saw the video below it reminded me of it. More importantly, it reminded me that the real opportunities are often the reverse of what we think they are.

*Footnote: This video also says something poignant about authority

We are born

On this earth…

we are all born as creative

we are all born as emotional

we are all born as caring

we are all born as compassionate

we are all born as inquisitve

we are all born as adventurers

we are all born as ‘entrepreneurs’

…

Our world tries as hard as it can to hide these ‘in built’ features from us. It scares us, no ‘scars us’ into ignoring our given instincts.

We ‘as entrepreneurs’ must do everything we can to get them back. To be as nature intended.

In order of preference

Face to face chat with single perosn who can make decision
Live internet video chat (skype / ustream et al)
Phone call
Internet chat (IM style)
Direct tweet
Text message
Email

(Pic by Christian Gates)

So is this for Customers, Suppliers, Investors or Media?

All of them – they are all people.

Digital project list

To do lists matter. In fact they matter a lot. The problem I find with always long to do lists is the that urgent always takes place of the important. And occasionally important projects fall off the agenda. They do this because they seem to live on the bottom of the ‘to do’ list.

This is why we must have a digital version of our to do list. Even if we are a pen an paper kind of person. As I am, which can be seen here, here and here.

The beauty of the digital to do list is the footprint lasts for ever. The important, but not urgent  items on the bottom of the list don’t need to be carried over with the pen. So they wont get lost in transition.

A good way to do it is to have a digital project list and an actual to do list for the day – that is, the items which you will certainly finish today. Remember, we can always add another item if we blow our own minds and finish all our tasks early.